Guild Wars 2

Thanks, OstrichEggs.

Ostricheggs.3742:

GhOst.4019:

Those people do not work, and do not go to school. They are either young kids/ college kids on school holiday break, or they are jobless hobo’s. If they want to sit around and PvP for 9 hours a day, so be it. Why care?

yea people like this actually exist.

I know because I am one ;_;

Ostricheggs,

Are you basically pleased with the lifestyle? Or are there aspects that you feel you need to change? Just honestly asking. Seriously.

If people are not making problems for themselves by neglecting career, rent, relationships and their health and weight….then by all means, I think they should do whatever is enjoyable for them.

I guess I posted it because I just noticed how much time it takes to play all those games since December 16th when the leaderboard started.

I am looking at the leaderboard and I see the #1 rank player has 587 games in the last 22 days. The #2 has 559.

That’s 25 or 26 games per day, on average. Probably more on the weekends and less on workdays.

Ithilwen.1529,

Only MMR is weighted in matchmaking.

Win/Loss is a “side statistic” that ArenaNet provides, but it has no meaning unless you it was for reasonably hard matches against opponents of approximately you skill level.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

infantrydiv.1620:

Yes. Although I don’t know if Team Arena would really need a matching system like that. The old system would be fine.

but in the old team arena, the queue time seems to be very long, and the fights quality are not very good either, it is usually full teams stomping pug teams.

I think that the GW2 “problem” is that the skill difference is HUGE between an average MMO player, and a highly “twitch-skilled” player who has been playing FP shooters and street fighter games for 10 years or more. This is due to both the GW2 game mechanics and the team coordination and reactive strategies needed for Conquest maps.

They want to develop GW2 as an elite ESport. That means they have to keep the high-skilled players interested in the game. And that means feeding them solo PUGs when there is no one else for them to play against.

NeXeD.3042:

I’m a soloer and I haven’t been able to play a ton of games due to holidays but so far I’m 16-1…… I have run into premades as well.

And?

I’d be interested in your logic about win/loss as a valid skill indicator in the current matching situation.

Why are so many of you insisting that win/loss matters, when the matches we all get are regularly lopsided, and when teams have a clear advantage over solo’ers?

SaintSnow.6593:

Keep your combat log up primarily. It’s much more useful than chat which could derail at anytime.

I’d watch the chat. Only ignore it if it is trash talk. Otherwise, you can miss key information.

It would be useful if ArenaNet could have a service in game that suggests other people who are close to your MMR that you can team with. You would send them a whisper and ask them if they’d like to team up, and what role they are best at.

coglin.1867:

Just to be clear. With the cast+after cast, bombs are not even remotely close to damage every 1/2 second. it is practically double that. That said, I love bomb kit myself, but I didn’t want newer folks to the engineer misunderstanding.

So it is closer to 3200 per second? Cool!

No, win loss is meaningless since the matcher puts you in situations you are not expected to win.

You called out a win/loss of 46% as if it meant something about skill.

Look. If you want win/loss to mean anything, then only allow play in your specific bracket.

And no…GW2 does not HAVE brackets. They will put any noob against a veteran team if that’s all that is in the queue at the moment.

If you are going to essentially mix Gold bracket players with Bronze players, forget high win/loss as meaning anything other than you had easy games against weak opponents.

I mean, seriously, think this through a little more before saying a high win/loss ration in the current situation proves you have skill.

“Half the people on the front page are in the 50%’s.”

Doesn’t this just mean the matcher does a good job of giving a match where you have a only a 50/50 chance of winning? As designed?

I have found that a bomber build (power, soldier/dolyak) with a rocket turret and the thumper turret (which is very high health and hard to destroy) has been working well. When a beefy bomber engineer runs swiftly around the point dropping bombs that hit for 1600 each every half second with an AOE, with the rocket blasting for about 1800 every 4 seconds in an 5-person AOE burst, and the thumper keeping them perma crippled…people don’t quite know how to handle it.

SYPHA.9283:

REGGADO.1237:

Then they should make achievements for losing in pvp. /miss newpvp achivements

They have that in place…..it’s called the leaderboards. just look at the rank 5 player…more losses than wins…cant play for kitten and is rewarded with a top spot. lmfao gg anet

What evidence is there that the player is terrible? Because he was asked to carry a lot of solo PUGS against teams on Teamspeak and could not do it? Who can?

Viewing your stream I now TOTALLY understand the power of voice communications. You guys are talking fast and non-stop and coordinating everything, second to second.

Solo q’ers would never stand a chance.

Wintersnight.3061:

Teamq with Teamspeak is much, much more than calling out incs and glancing at the minimap. In fact, those two things are the least important.

People use Teamspeak to coordinate the bursts/ stuns/ fears / immobilize and most importantly…to say when they (or the enemy) blew an important cool-down or are about to go down, so the team can group rezz or burst.

That is why teamq is so much different than soloq. In upper level soloq, everyone usually wants to win, but have different opinions on how to get there. To be great at soloq in any game, you have to guess what your enemy is going to do “AND” your teammates. It’s an exercise is skill, leadership and social psychology and a completely different dynamic than Teamq.

If a skilled Teamq loses to a skilled soloq – well…you just gave a lifetime memory to those puggers

~Cindy Lou Who

Cindy Lou Who,

What an excellent post. Seriously. That is exactly why realtime voice communication is so powerful.

You don’t even have to look away from the battle, and you can hear exactly what your team is going to do and know, right now, how best to help!

Reading your summary made me wonder why I even bother trying to solo. IT IS SO HARD to guess the other team, and your own team, while trying to avoid the zerg piling on top of you.

This penalizes solo people who are thrown into a match against premades and are basically given a loss by the matcher. In my experience, it is really hard to earn points on a loss.

Sad truth behind all this:

There are not enough players queuing up at the same time for everyone to have an even, fun match.

It’s better during peak hours, but it still leaves a lot of people put into matches they cannot win.

Win ratio doesn’t mean anything in GW2. The matcher puts clueless new people up against veterans on voice communications, so how could their win ratio be a measure of great skill?

You want to prove you are the best? Then win only against the best. Decisively and often.

Brackets.

Nothing else has meaning.

Kako.1930:

All I got from this thread was “[I’m convinced that] I’m the best and I want my bragging rights.”

Yeah, I took it that way, too.

Backpack, you and about 25 others are really good at the game. You have recognition.

Now let there be something for everyone else to try for as they work to improve.

The current leaderboard is a handicap system to reward the everyday player for consistency and being an asset to the team on a consistent basis.

THuGaNoMiX.5036:

SobeSoul.6910:

I don’t find pvp stale at all. Probably needs more maps and game modes. Would like 1v1 and 2v2 type arenas and a few other things, but I enjoy it still. It’s the only thing I really do in this game.

It’s all I do as well now, and I don’t mean the actual gameplay/PvP is stale. The game mode is becoming stale. I’m almost to the point where I don’t want to do anything but fight other players and then my team gets kittened at me for not capturing points.

Conquest gets old after playing it 2,000 times.

Does basketball get old after playing it 2000 games? Soccer?

After all, the rules and the fields never, ever change.

It would be a good feature.

Backpack is exactly right, but only if he just plays against people In his MMR bracket.

If his top, experienced team is matched against uncoordinated, new, inexperienced players, such a league makes NO SENSE unless you ‘handicap’ the Match by giving the noobs Ladder points for a loss where they score a respectable amount of points against terrible, crushing odds.

You are right. Well, good to post it for them to see.

Justin said 8 minutes is the average. Ten minutes balances out the 1 minute queues.

And it is a holiday. If you could see the queue you’d probably see there were only 6 other people waiting, and maybe way below your skill level, so what would be the point of battling them anyway?

William,

No the matchmaking algorithm cannot analyze a match as a person could.

The idea here is to observe things that were not predicted from the MMRs. A reality check on why a prediction failed.

An MMR is adjusted after a match based on the accuracy of the existing MMRs in predicting the match.

This is circular logic. It makes me suspect self-reinforcing errors, and a somewhat inaccurate system.

Your MMR is not based primarily on your performance. It is inferred from you team’s score. And there can be many factors that mess up that process. Especially for a random solo team.

Maybe one team knows each other better and have established roles. Maybe they are using voice communications. Maybe the team makeup is better and MMR does not take that strongly enough into account.

All these things could make your MMR inaccurate.

The amount of random factors could drastically increase the time needed to determine your real MMR. You’d have to be in certain situations many, many times. Maybe it increases the number of matches needed exponentially. Maybe it could take 10,000 matches!

butch.8136:

savov.3712:

Laserbolt.6731:

OK, I see you were winning. Either way, who says the MMRs are correct?

Justin. Quoted him in the third post of this thread.

He said the match-up was correct (based on the data). Nothing else.

Right, but because Justin said nothing about the MMRs possible being inaccurate, it’s natural to assume he thought the MMRs probably were accurate, or he would have said something about that as an explanation.

OK, I see you were winning. I missed that. Either way, perhaps the MMRs are not really accurate predictors right now. That was my point behind my post.

Duka.5864:

I had 11 wins and 8 loses,with 11 points i was in 86%
But i saw i guy on 799 spot with 7 wins and 11 loses with 18 points SO HOW THIS kitten THING WORK!?

The player at 799 was on teams that did MUCH better than the matchmaker predicted.

This system does put you in matches that it expects you to lose. (Usually because there is no other team in the queue at your skill level).

If you WIN one of those matches, you can get more than one point.

“So dont try to blame me on “loser QQing” “l2p” etc.”

I didn’t. Please reread my post.

savov.3712:

Laserbolt.6731:

savov.3712,

As I interpret it, Justin reported that your teams were the same size and the average team MMRs were about equal, so it was an even match and your team had as much of a chance at winning as the other team did.

As I interpret it, you didn’t even take the time to look at the picutres from the previous thread. Despite that makeing stupid excuses.
Look at them, all of them are blownouts 500:100.

I understand. Justin answered your complaint that by telling you the MMRs were right for an even match.

So the implication was that it was your team’s problem of just not playing up to your skill level, not the problem of the MMRs being inaccurate. I am not saying I agree. I suspect the MMRs right now do not reflect skill level accurately in all situations.

Depending on the degree of mismatch, say a 5-man of high MMR against 5 solos playing class dailies, I could see “lowering the scoring bar” for the newbies to get a point for the match.

Inducing people to try a new class for a day, but using their main class MMR as their skill indicator for the matcher…will cause uneven matches for sure.

savov.3712,

As I interpret it, Justin reported that your teams were the same size and the average team MMRs were about equal, so it was an even match and your team had as much of a chance at winning as the other team did.

If the MMRs accurately reflect team skills right now, then you would have no basis for a complaint.

Yes Arr Dee “frand” I wish the personal score was just dropped so you would not be comparing a DPS with a bunker, etc.

Justin ODell.9517:

Nighthawk.4687:

See that is like the exact opposite from what I witnessed. Any time we had 3 or 4 we got demolished.

Counting only 3+ in your party: 11 wins, 22 losses. That more closely corresponds with your intuition on the matter. I couldn’t see any overall pattern to those games that stands out as an explanation.

Which means there is likely something the MMR is not measuring, I think.

Speaking as a lifelong software engineer, I’m wondering if the code is written in such a way that changing things is not easy without breaking something seemingly unrelated. Maybe the changes over the past two years since launch were not implemented robustly, and were slapped on incorrectly such that changing a value here meant you had to look at five other places…perhaps causing the issue I mentioned above.

And maybe that is why they do so little balancing.

It occurs to me that you wouldn’t need to actually play in the game.

You could spectate it and do a “matchmaker/prediction accuracy report”.

A requirement would be that the analyzer would have to fundamentally understand Conquest strategy and be able to spot where the matchup failed to meet the prediction and what the predictor missed in its calculation.

Two years ago it used to be higher, I think, and they lowered it to 5 pts, I think.

The game is supposed to be more about strategy and less about dueling.

Justin, here is your recent reply to a player who had badly lost two games:

That wasn’t your imagination, you were predicted to lose both times.

1) Forest, was 2-1-1-1 vs 2-1-1-1 You had a slight rank and MMRs disadvantage though.
2) Foefire, was 2-2-1 vs 1-1-1-1-1, ranks were even, but you had MMR advantage. Apparently wasn’t enough to overcome roster disadvantage.

The second one is interesting, and I think some changes I’ve been working on will help.

Now then…here a player reported to you what actually happened and you have rightly compared to the Prediction and the MMR “balance” of the match.

It is only through this sort of analysis that you can find out if the matching algorithm and Prediction are accurate. Otherwise you could just be twiddling knobs forever and never really making it better.

IDEA: “Secret Shoppers”. People who understand the game and can play specific matches to report back to you what actually happened and why so you can fix flaws in the matching and the Predictor.

It’s a key reality check.

^^^

Looking at Impact’s analysis, and the analysis of others above, it is easy to see why players queuing solo are at such a disadvantage over a thoughtful team that has played together and weighs all these things (and thinks in the way Impact is pointing out).

It would be worth a discussion on just HOW a solo player can have the best chance.

Thanks for the insights. I had read and always thought that bunkering far was a classic strategy. If you get killed, just head back and keep them having to go get you, pulling them away from mid.

You’re a time waster for two enemies, ideally.

Ranked Match. Some guy says to team, “Nobody go to far unless you can kill something.”

I play a bunker. I can hold of 1 or 2 for quite a while. I like to go to far and do that because it gives me a well-delineated role that helps the team win at the other points.

Thoughts?

Hey butch, just don’t read the ones I start.

It’s easy. Just look at who started the thread listed to the right.

<sigh>
It’s the “Mom afk”

“Based on the data alone so far, I’d say we’re at least 90% toward where we all want to be. Just need to drive home that last bit. The vast majority of matches are solos vs solos. " — Justin O’Dell

This does not seem to align with what players are saying on the forums. They are losing every game, in many cases.

Perhaps you could post the scores of all the matches every day.

The 500-10s would stand out and we could all see if “it’s just us”, or if the matcher is not really 90% of the way there yet.

Sure does. Classes have roles that they do best, working together.